Riding from Samos to Portomarin was another in a series of excellent days. The morning started out wet and chilly, giving me another opportunity to wear my cool rain slicker.
A lovely woodland path takes you out of Samos and joins the main Camino to Sarria where sure enough lots more pilgrims are on the Camino. I ran into several I had met in the stages I walked last week including my four new Camino friends from St. Louis.
We stopped in Sarria for our midmorning break while Rafa and Felipe attended to Gavilan’s shoe, the equivalent of a flat tire on a road trip.
And in Sarria I saw a parade of handicapped perigrinos. Seems there’s an organization of local volunteers who help handicapped individuals achieve their dream of doing the Camino. In this parade there were 3 peregrinos but one of the volunteers told me that in some parades they have as many as 6.
Once the shoe had been fixed we set out to cover the 22 km to Portomarin. It was great fun to ride through Sarria, which is a good sized town, after which we rode through a number of smaller villages.
Once you leave Sarria, you climb 250 meters over 15 kms and then descend 350 meters over the next 5 kms down to Portomarin.
We were pressed for time, but I was thirsty for a beer, so I told Rafa that if he knew of a friendly bar along the way where they would serve us astride our horses that I would buy us all a round of “quintos.” A quinto is a tiny bottled beer, one-fifth of a liter, a little less than 8 ozs, also called a botellín which was just delicious. After which Lucera and I took the lead.
The 300 meter descent to Portomarin offered incredible panoramic views. In the 1950s, the Spanish government built a new dam which flooded old Portomarin which was moved to a new location up the hill. The town’s church was dismantled, moved and rebuilt stone by stone to its new location in the new Portomarin. They numbered every stone during the process and the numbers can still be seen in many of the stones.
We walked the old bridge into Portomarin, stayed in the cutest hotel and had a nice dinner nicest dinner outside on the terrace.
We are now only about 93 km from Santiago. Tomorrow we’ll cover 34 more, all of Stage 30 from Portomarin to Palas de Rei and the first 10 kms of Stage 31 to Casa de Somoza where we are staying the night.
Buen Camino!
Beautiful horse! 😊
She is and she looks so much like my horse Colleen. I’m gonna post side by side pictures of them at some point.